Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday January 15, 2013 @01:16PM
from the pay-enough-you'll-get-all-you-want dept.

CWmike writes "It's starting to look like the BlackBerry store will be well stocked with apps when Research In Motion launches BlackBerry 10 (see YouTube preview) at the end of this month. The company held an event over the weekend where it offered app developers incentives to port their programs to the BlackBerry 10 platform and managed to attract 15,000 app submissions. 'Well there you have it. 37.5 hours in, we hit 15,000 apps for this portathon. Feel like I've run a marathon. Thanks to all the devs!' wrote Alec Saunders, vice president of developer relations at RIM, in a Twitter message. The 'port-a-thon' event was held in two parts: One aimed at Android developers and the other at apps written in other platforms, including Appcelerator, Maramalade, Sencha, jQuery, PhoneGap and Qt. RIM was offering $100 for each app ported and subsequently approved for sale in the BlackBerry 10 app store, up to certain limits. Developers could also win BlackBerry 10 development handsets and a trip to RIM's BlackBerry Jam Europe developer event." It's hard to believe that many current iOS or Android users are leaping toward Blackberry, though. If you're in one of those camps, is that so crazy?

That's my thinking. If all you have to do is a quick rejig and recompile because the APIs are so close to the Android ones, then it's a near-zero effort situation. I don't know much about the new platform, but I thought I had read that it would support Android apps out of the box, so it may literally may be just pushing a button.

Not that there's a damned wrong with that. If Android compatibility or portability is good enough, then you already have thousands of apps ready to go and you don't need to put massive amounts of effort into convincing developers to support your platform (like Redmond is doing).

After going through hoop after hoop to try to release an app to their store including notarized this, and documented that... for a FREE FRIGGING APP, I gave up when they told me that I needed to submit a business plan to them. I couldn't believe it.